Donald Trump thought he was going to be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2017, threw a fit when he found out he wasn’t going to get it, and was humiliated when it was instead given to the women who had exposed him and others as sexual predators. Trump is going to be even more humiliated in 2018 when Time Magazine decides to give the award to someone who will probably try to decline it, but who will have earned it several times over: Robert Mueller.

Back when Mueller was first appointed Special Counsel in mid-May, legal experts told us not to expect any visible results until at least the end of the year, and perhaps for a full twelve months. Why? The Trump-Russia scandal is the most complex criminal scandal in history, and making things even more complicated, the perpetrators are illegally occupying several of the highest offices in the land. Yet Mueller has already arrested four co-conspirators, including two of Trump’s top people, and put multiple plea deals in place. This is just the warm up act.

The remarkable part is that Mueller has made this much progress, yet he’s still managed to keep most of it under wraps. We know that Michael Flynn has cut a plea deal. We think that he’s turned over evidence against Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. We have no idea if Kushner has cut a deal. We know Sam Clovis is cooperating. We think he’s ratted out Jeff Sessions. We have no idea what Sessions has done in response. And that’s the point: so long as Mueller remains several steps ahead of the media and the public, he also remains several steps ahead of the people he’s targeting. But we’re about to see a lot more spill out into the public view in the next few weeks.

Keep in mind that Robert Mueller managed to arrest George Papadopoulos and keep it a secret for four months, until he decided it was time to strategically reveal it. We have no idea how many other Trump-Russia participants he’s arrested, cut deals with, and obtained evidence from. But one way or the other, we’ll soon begin to find out just what he got from the Flynn deal. That’s the deal he had been seeking all along, and it’s the deal that he’ll use to blow things wide open once he has all of his pieces in place. It’s Mueller Time.